Criticism
The Roman Catholic Church has labeled Samael Aun Weor's Christian Gnostic Movement as a pseudo-church and some Roman Catholic authors have accused Samael Aun Weor of trying to seduce Roman Catholic priests and nuns to abandon their vows of celibacy and practice the sexual teachings promulgated by the Gnostic Movement; these authors also believe that the current wave to discredit the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church comes from the same source while others go so far as to label it heresy.
As of 11 Feb 1984 or thereabouts, the Ministry of Tenerife, Spain, denied incorporation to Samael Aun Weor's Universal Christian Gnostic Church of Spain operating from 38 San Francisco St., in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, on the grounds that said organization is not a legitimate church as it does not have any record of incorporation as such in any country whatsoever.
In 1990, after numerous consultations with high-ranking members of the Roman Catholic Church and other figures who prefer to remain anonymous such as lawyers, public prosecutors, psychiatrists and psychologists, Pilar Salarrullana who has been a political figure since 1974 and is considered an expert on sects, published Las Sectas (The Sects: a living testament to Messianic terror in Spain) which became a best-seller with six editions the first year alone and in spite of its popularly inquisitorial tone, it denounces the Gnostic Movements among others as some of the most dangerous anti-social plagues in Spain.
In 1991, F. W. Haack (1935–1991), who was chief delegate of the Evangelical Church with responsibility for sects and ideologies, attacked Weor's ideology in a German book published in Zurich — nevertheless the Gnostic branches of the movement in Germany and Switzerland are still active and expanding. The Gnostic associations are active in Switzerland with a moderate following of Italian, French and German speaking members.
Read more about this topic: Samael Aun Weor
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)